A proposal on cooperative transmission control middleware on a smartphone in a WLAN environment

In recent years, due to digital convergence mobile devices that connect to the Internet, e.g. smartphones and tablets, have grown exponentially. Smartphones, which replaces the PDA or the cellular phone, has come to use much bandwidth like a general computer. However, it is a problem that the throughput of wireless communication is deteriorated by traffic congestion when multiple smartphones share one single access point (AP). TCP congestion control plays a critical role in the end-to-end connection in order not to overflow the traffic although most of the bottleneck of network bandwidth is the wireless part. In this paper, we present a middleware for cooperative transmission control on smartphones. The middleware exchanges information among the other smartphones in the same wireless LAN(WLAN) and helps smartphone adjust the congestion control to surrounding environment. As the result, both communication throughput and the fairness for bandwidth utilization are improved with the cooperative control. We implemented the middleware on the Android platform and evaluated it with real devices to show the effectiveness.